GRAVE GOSSIP AND STORM DAMAGE

Vanishing Trick marked a watershed in Patten's poetry, confirming and securing his reputation as a love poet of vision and distinction. Over the years of Grave Gossip (1979) and Storm Damage (1988), however, his focus as a writer was subtly to begin to shift – even though love was still to remain an important theme in his future poetry collections. In the decade that followed Vanishing Trick, Patten himself was growing older, friends and family were growing older alongside him, friends were beginning to die. The themes of ageing and of mortality, as the title quotation suggests, began to feature more prominently in his work.

The years of Grave Gossip and Storm Damage were in many ways an important time for re-evaluation. The metaphor of being lost in the woods which appears in both ‘Frogs in the Wood’ and ‘Going Back and Going On’ in Grave Gossip / Grinning Jack signals a search not only for personal but also for artistic direction. Ultimately this period was to function as a time of experiment and rehearsal. Grave Gossip and Storm Damage can be seen with hindsight to have foreshadowed and led up to the publication of Armada (1996), just as Little Johnny's Confession, Notes to the Hurrying Man and – to some extent – The Irrelevant Song can be seen now to have blazed the trail that was to reach its destination in Vanishing Trick.

During the time in which he was writing the poems in Grave Gossip, Patten was still based in London – although by then he had moved from Notting Hill Gate to a basement flat in Holland Park Gardens – but he was spending substantial time away from the city living in a boathouse in Devon on the country estate of Sharpham owned by the philosopher Maurice Ash, who had been a friend of Patten's for some years. The affectionate birthday poem ‘Dear Maurice’ in Storm Damage was written for Maurice Ash. Patten still remains a frequent visitor to the Sharpham estate and to Devon's South Hams area, where a number of friends such as Val and Jim Hennessy have since settled.